With the growth in the satellite and cable industries, there has been significant interest in developing architecture for delivering full-length movies to a home multimedia user. One concept of delivery called video on demand (VOD) provides a movie to a user based upon the selection that the user makes. The user may select programming via an electronic programming guide (EPG) that lists available media that may be received through a broadcast service. Once the movie is selected, the broadcast system would transmit the movie to the home user, the transmission either occurring through a cable means (such as a MPEG-2 digital cable transmission), a satellite broadcast (as DBS, DIRECTV™, DISH NETWORK™, etc.), a terrestrial broadcast (UHF, VHF, or broadcast channels for receiving standard definition/high definition programming, etc.), or twisted pair connection (such as DSL, etc.).
The complexity of transmitting a digital video (audio) file, hence forth referred to as a media object, requires that the transmission architecture be capable of handling digital video files of a large size. For instance, the requirements for a media object to be displayed at a “near to motion picture quality” (ex. High Definition Television), as a display format, requires that the transmission architecture requires the network support a throughput of nearly 20 Mbits/sec. The transmission architecture also has to have a low transmission error rate, as to not corrupt the requirements of the video/audio transmission. For instance, DBS satellite systems have to have error rates in the range from 10^-9 to 10^-11 bits to offer an acceptable quality of service (QOS).
The likelihood for an error corrupting the transmission of a media object is reduced if a media object is broken up into discrete segments. Such segments, known as data packets, separate the media object into individual divisions that are reconstituted at a receiving end of the transmission architecture. One used technique for packetizing data files complies with the MPEG-2 data-encoding standard to create a data stream (see MPEG-2 Specification ISO-13818-1) for encoding and transporting discrete data packets.
Such techniques for transmitting media objects are however not an efficient use of bandwidth. Other known techniques for transporting media objects such as file transport protocol (FTP) are limited to physical constraints where only 300 Kilobytes per second can be transmitted, regardless of the available link speeds of the underlying connection. Additionally, some media object transportation techniques are capable of utilizing the available bandwidth of a connection. Such techniques though use redundant packets in the transmission of a media object that may require an encoding overhead of twice the size of the original media object. Hence, such media object transmissions inefficiently use half the available bandwidth for error correction.